January 2, 2011

Wladimir is porting AdBlock Plus to Chromium (Chrome). I would preferer a XUL AdBlock Plus appplication as well for more flexibility with more browsers via local proxy. Leave the browser to browsing, remember proxomitron glory, and maybe someday take a page from “google’s” playbook of multiple processes to keep multiple extension [bloat] from draggin’ us down.

on the occasion of being asked for phone ‘advice’ the truth rarely disuades one snared by Morning Star’s twinkling light: it’s not a phone, it’s not a tablet, it’s not smart. It is an indentity challenged device that’s flat, can make calls though beyond the phone appellation little more regard is offered in marketing, and it’s sly at best running adroid (AOSP). What is google’s PRIMARY function (yes, all for-profit companies exist to make money) ?? Data minining. What is google’s SECONDARY function? Showing ads.

Now 720p is “true HD glory” and 4.3 inches is a “large widescreen”?

If you insist on a droid x, person x, please ‘root’ it and slap in a less creepy ROM. At the very least you’ll GAIN ADBLOCKING.

December 25, 2010

VERY important consideration. The INITIAL provisioning of your ONT is automated. ANY change to bandwidth provisioning (more or less) *can* result in ONT ‘design’ being constructed by hand. Have horrific latency at saturation? You might be the victim of ONT ‘design’ being hand constructed 😦

…

extracting deals from their site was far less irksome than fighting the meth head “design”

other great deals today… I upgraded my speed, channel linup, and added a non-voip phone line for backup and faxing and will be spending LESS each month… sure with 2 year contract

scatter the materials over the sand in the bowl in a “hit or miss” fashion

mix one part of the water glass with three parts water

pour the mixture slowly over the chemical-strewn sand

the depth of liquid should not exceed four to six inches

set the bowl aside in a place where it will not be shaken or jarred

“Soon you will see queer little colored growths appearing here and there which in the course of a few days will grow upward and assume various shapes. In a week or to you will have a chemical garden similar to the one pictured. You will have some mushrooms, fungi, grasses, beats, and oranges. Nearly all colors of the spectrum are represented. Most curious are the growths which extend downward into the sand along the sides of glass. If left undisturbed the chemical flower bed will grow for weeks. And then like living things the growths will slowly disintegrate.”

Oh, you want a work around? Other than the two super awesome above? Yeah, sure.. merely install software you really don’t want: media server THAT plays well with rebaged junk.

Western Digital TV Live Plus HD is pointless pain. If you’re the idiot at which it was targeted you are likely blissfully pleased with it.

Until the firmware allows one to specify the UNC path for shares this gizmo is dead opposite convenient. shipping firmware 1.03.26_B (the B and functionality suggests beta) but as shipped firmware ‘by definition’ is no longer beta let’s call it beta_plus.

Western Digital TV Live Plus HD failures:

cannot specify network share UNC path

idiotic reliance on Master Browser

NOT dlna certified

GUI during video playback is poorly conceived, time consuming to navigate, and less than informative

file deletion cannot be accomplished via the playback interface, but only the file management setup in options

‘less complicated’ remote is less than useful further requiring fighting more gui levels

because of its inanely small size it is difficult for many to identify that maximum fastness has been achieved .. because the IR remote is less than satisfactory about a third of the time the command never reaches the box [unobstructed 10 foot corridor]

16x is not fast enough. Re-transcoding to increase I-frames while not sensible is briefly tempting

no obvious way to spoke a video to a specific time. Want to begin watching at 1:02:19 ? Too bad. Enjoy the fast forward “speed”

before I return it I hope to confirm that it chokes on 1080p high bandwidth videos since in their brilliance it does not sport gigabit ethernet

I’ve already been burned by Netflix bait-and-switch “all the movies you want”

netflix motto is actually “all the movies WE want YOU TO RECEIVE”

$9/mo netflix for nowhere near a reasonable number of movies I want

I certainly don’t want any in shoddy transcode streams

For $8/mo I can access the storage array that predates the interweb and gopher

no conspiracy actual months of testing to confirm — especially entertaining is loading one movie return envelope with multiple movies and watching how ‘slowly’ each ‘arrives’ in the warehouse… variably hmmmm

boot times? there are no moving parts. why does booting take so long??

USB is a thought step in the right direction for the low end market. No esata? fail

no forward thinking USB3? the cart must lead the donkey to UFD

boxee box also fails to offer esata

I haven’t bothered playing with the music features. I don’t want to be disappointed again.

on a side note: why do home NAS boxen not FULLY implement Sata?? DIY sata nas to achieve port multiplication (scsi daisy chain spill over) .. but no commercial embrace of port multiplier in home gear? fail!

It was not a plus that amazon fulfillment did not bother to pad the shipping box. Since boxes tumble all six faces must have padding.. duh?

Even purdey finally gave in to manufacturing technology updates (thanks to one awesome guy).. dragged kicking and screaming into the future almost and not really. A small amoute of luddite repellent sunk into their website, too.